DIRTY LAUNDRY

Pub Date: July 1st, 2003ISBN: 0-345-45700-5Publisher: One World/Random House

Another busy night of high-profile corpses for LAPD Robbery-Homicide.

Hideo Yoshimoto, the grandfather of Mark Ikehara, the deputy DA angling for mayor, has been shot to death, and Vicki Park, Korean campaign strategist for Latino mayoral candidate Mike Santos, is dead of blunt-force trauma. Called out of her doctor boyfriend’s bed to work the Park case with lesbian detective Billie Truesdale and newly transferred wunderkind Roger Middleton, widowed black detective Charlotte Justice (Stormy Weather, 2001, etc.) must decide (a) if Park spurned her fiancé for another lover, (b) if Korean gangs are involved, (c) if political jockeying for a spot on the ticket has gotten out of hand, and (d) if the two deaths that night are related. More complications crop up when Park’s secret files on the other political hopefuls go missing, a member of the department’s Asian Task Force is gunned down, and Santos, his alcoholic wife, teenaged daughter, and second-in-command eerily know classified police business. Who’s leaking information? And why do Justice’s superiors call off her raid on the Koreatown massage parlor near where Park’s body was found? Dirty cops? A sting in progress? Ultimately, wending past departmental racist and sexist slurs, media-hungry politicos with sordid family secrets, and a cop who puts a gun to his mouth, Justice prevails.

If you need a reason not to move to LA, take the police exam, or run for office, count on Woods to give it to you.